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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., claimed recently that his son somehow ended up enrolled in Medicaid, even though the senator wanted to buy private insurance. The claim is one of PolitiFact's top five most fact-checked claims from January. Read them all here.
(Mara Kuhn/Associated Press)

The story, written by Louis Jacobson, found that bloggers were offering headlines like this one: “Obamacare Medical Codes Confirm: Execution by Beheading To Be Implemented in America.”

Well, if the French gave us the Statute of Liberty, would asking for a guillotine be too much of a stretch? Yes, Jacobson found, it would. The coding system in question long predates President Barack Obama, and the “beheading” classification it mentions is only relevant for death statistics. There were other woeful problems with the claim, as well, which earned a Pants on Fire.

Gene Sperling, a top economic adviser to the president and director of the National Economic Council, had been pushing Congress to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program before its Dec. 28 expiration.

In doing so, he claimed that in today’s economy, there are three people looking for work per job available. PolitiFact’s story, written by Julie Kliegman, crunched numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and got the same ratio, as did economists she consulted. The claim was rated True.

The president, in a speech in North Carolina, said the country is producing more oil at home than it is buying from the rest of the world for the first time in nearly two decades.

Kliegman’s story found that the claim is accurate, but noted that a lot of this has been in the works for awhile, including dynamics that pre-date the Obama administration. “Experts told us the new dynamic is due to factors like the recession, increased fuel efficiency and ramped up domestic oil production,” she wrote. Still, the claim is straight forward and was rated True.

One of the more interesting glitches of the new health care law’s roll out involved the claim from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said his son had been enrolled in Medicaid even though he wanted to pay for private insurance.

Ultimately, writer Steve Contorno, due to other glitches and caveats, couldn’t arrive at a ruling. But he did look into whether it’s possible for someone who fits the son’s description – a young adult under the age of 26 who makes less than $15,856 and is applying for health cave coverage separate from his parents – to qualify for Medicaid, even if the parents do not. Contorno found that if the son had told officials he was someone else’e dependent, he should not have qualified.

Certainly, women are seeking advanced degrees at rates that far outpace men, a fact that’s been the case for many years. But Paul, in saying that women constitute more than half of enrollees at medical, dental and law schools, missed the mark.

Women are close to 50 percent in those areas, but they aren’t a majority in any of them. “And in both law and medicine, the trendlines for female enrollment have actually fallen in recent years,” according to Contorno’s story. He rated Paul’s statement False.

Any favorite fact-checks of your own stand out? Any that don’t involve, say, beheadings? Let us know and we’ll reprint them here.